Pretoria - DA leader Helen Zille will be in Pretoria on Thursday for the deadline of the handing over of the so-called “spy tapes”.
Democratic Alliance supporters would gather outside the High Court in Pretoria at noon, where Zille would announce the status of the handover, the party said in a statement on Wednesday.
She would be accompanied by DA Gauteng leader John Moodey, Gauteng north chairman Solly Msimanga and national spokespeople Marius Redelinghuys and Phumzile van Damme.
Last week the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that within five days the National Prosecuting Authority had to comply with a previous order, in an application brought by the Democratic Alliance, to release the tapes.
President Jacob Zuma had opposed the move.
The recordings, internal memoranda, reports and minutes of meetings dealing with the contents of the recordings had to be provided.
Conversations on the recordings were cited as a reason to drop fraud and corruption charges against Zuma, shortly before he was sworn in as president in 2009.
The tapes allegedly reveal collusion between the former heads of the Directorate of Special Operations, the now defunct Scorpions, Leonard McCarthy, and the NPA's former head Bulelani Ngcuka, to manipulate the prosecutorial process before the ANC's Polokwane conference in 2007. Zuma was elected ANC president at the conference.
At the time, acting NPA boss Mokotedi Mpshe said they showed there was a political conspiracy against Zuma and so the case could not continue.
The DA applied for access to the recordings and, despite winning previous court cases, could not obtain them.
Zuma's legal team had argued in the latest application that the DA would use them against him for political gain.
DA federal executive chairman James Selfe on Wednesday told Sapa the party had been making logistical arrangements with the NPA for the delivery of the recordings and documents.
“ 1/8We are 3/8 confident we will get them in the course of tomorrow.”
The NPA has said it would comply with the court order.
Selfe said the DA was also looking at a section in a judgment by the Western Cape High Court on the N1/N2 Winelands Toll Highway project, which could set a precedent.
Last week, the court dismissed applications to keep certain court documents on the N1/N2 Winelands Toll Highway project secret.
Judge Ashley Binns-Ward made orders that would effectively keep certain information from the public until the court started to review the SA National Roads Agency Limited's (Sanral) decision to toll the roads.
Sanral and its preferred bidder, Protea Parkway Consortium (PPC), had applied to the court to prevent the City of Cape Town from filing its supplementary founding papers in open court.
Binns-Ward said the city could file its papers per normal court procedure, but that no one could disseminate or publish the administrative record or any affidavit in the supplementary papers before the review hearing.
The court held that once classified information was referred to in court proceedings, the question of whether it should be made public was to be determined by the court.
Selfe said the DA was getting legal advice.
“We are looking at the judgment very carefully,” he said.
“We are waiting for legal opinion on that and we will have that legal opinion before we take possession of the spy tapes.”
The party would be guided by what was in the best interest of its review application, Selfe said.
Sapa